Good Bad Girl review: Cersei, Sin Rostro, Katherine Pierce are out there. Why flounder here?

Samridhi Dewan in 'Good Bad Girl', which dropped on SonyLIV on October 14, 2022.

There was a little girl,

Who had a little curl,

Right in the middle of her forehead.

When she was good,

She was very good indeed,

But when she was bad,

She was horrid.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) wrote this poem over 400 years ago and we have impolite versions of this poem for kids who would tie dragonflies to a string and watch them struggle to escape… Tell me you’ve never trained a magnifying glass on an insect crawling happily and startled it with that little sizzle. Heck, we grew up in cities so we used our little siblings for science… Am not rambling, just saying that Maya, the protagonist of Good Bad Girl is not bad enough, and yes, not good enough to hold your attention for too long.

Take Katharine Pierce from The Vampire Diaries, for example. She has no heart, but she makes up for it with her quick wit, and her retorts are very, very good. Even Jenna in Pretty Little Liars does that ‘Jenna thing’, but you stay interested in her, you want to know if she’s really blind…

The first episode of Good Bad Girl starts with great promise: Mujhe jhoot bolne mein bada maza aata hai. It’s Maya, a girl who is interviewing for a place in Pune’s law college. So this show is going to be about a girl who can get out of legal jams and become a winner.

But immediately after that they plunge into the gaping void of predictability to establish her character. A girl who lies must then drink lots of alcohol, party hard and thanks to Lust Stories, must be shown to experience la petite mort to prove their cool. Why Vikas Bahl, why? You made a movie like Queen (where the female protagonist had all the right in the world to wreak vengeance on the man who dumped her at the altar), do you step into this feculent stereotype?

I shake my head in what I have come to realise is the beginnings of despair as Maya (played by Samridhi Dewan, whom one has last seen in Imperfect and a blink and miss role in the movie Lucknow Central) begins to flounder in court because she’s been to a doctor who tells her that she needs more tests because she may have cancer.

I sigh. They want to turn her into Lucious Lyon of Empire? He’s diagnosed with ALS. His opponent in the music business is his wife, and the show runs on the strength both bring to their roles (with grey characters like their son Hakeem Lyon thrown in for good measure). But he never once comes across as someone who flounders. You cannot build an empire if you falter at your job. Even the rom-com Clueless, by the great Nora Ephron, with a female protagonist whose dad is a lawyer showed us that you can argue your way out of a C-plus grade to an A-minus by persuasion.

By that tradition, I wanted Maya to be cool, calm and collected in court, lying to get her own way instead of shoving her colleague, incurring the wrath of the judge with her rudeness and practically wrecking the case. But there’s a runaway mouth, lots of eye-popping and eye rolling, and I approved as the judge banned her for three months.

But the show about a Delhi gal who has studied law in Pune, practicing in Mumbai doesn’t get out of the mess she creates. Now there are many OTT shows and films that have lead characters who are psychopaths. These people don’t know the difference between right and wrong. So when they show Maya cashing in on a disease like cancer to keep her job, get extra perks at work and gain social media followers and even sympathy doesn’t quite cut it because she is made to smile knowingly at the camera which says look how I fooled these people. That cancels out the childhood flashbacks of her confusion between what is right and what is wrong.

But there’s not one dialog that is memorable, not one moment where you smile back at her for getting her way.

You may not have liked all the lawyers in a show like Suits, but they’re all great characters. And the protagonist has to hide his lack of a degree rather well.

You want Maya's opponent at work - Sahil Mistry - to be less unwashed and to do a better job. Vaibhav Raj Gupta as Sahil Mistry is miscast (he was brilliant in Gullak) and also not given anything to do or say. Even simple things like his mission to find out the dirt on Maya is simplistic. What he could have found out by employing a detective to do a background check is offered to us by showing him travelling to Pune, going to their supposed record room, finding the yearbook and tapping on the photographs… That’s just lazy work, word wise and otherwise.

Maya's family is sweet Sheeba Chaddha and Rajendra Sethi as harried parents handling a kid who grows up to be Maya. Her neighbours are very filmy: Chugh uncle who steals bras (Rajesh Sharma wasted in a small role!), Chugh Aunty who gossips. Maya (called Bulbul as a child) has a friend Ashwin (who first teaches her the power of lying) who conveniently vanishes from the scene...

A ghastly dialogue that produced a thousand memes 'Choti bacchi ho kya’ popped in my head several times during the unfolding of this tale, which shows Maya as morally ambivalent one second and then suddenly growing a conscience, crying over ‘blame my bachpan’ scenes. Before you know it, she’s got that ‘Don’t challenge me’ look again!

Maya could have been a female Tyler Durden, but the show ends up telling us that we will have to watch the second season to see her actually win. Do you have the time? Naah. I’d rather watch the Korean film Parasite again.